Black Gate – Page 987 – Adventures in Fantasy Literature

Monthly Short Story Roundup — December

Tuesday, January 7, 2014 Fletcher Vredenburgh Comments 4 comments

This past December, new short stories in heroic fiction were almost as scarce as good Conan pastiches. Not that it’s been a bad month for heavier fantasy fiction, as both the Milton Davis/Charles Saunders-edited Griots: Sisters of the Spear and John R. Fultz’s trilogy-ending Seven Sorcerers came out. It’s just short fiction that wasn’t happening.

In the past three issues of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, I found only a single story that fits the S&S bill (sort of). It’s like the editors have decided they will not satisfy my need for more/new/good tales of S&S adventure. I feel like they’ve read my short story roundups and are looking to spite me for being disappointed in their emphasis on almost everything but heroic fiction lately. Fortunately, Swords and Sorcery Magazine came through with its regular monthly pair of stories.

Swords and Sorcery Magzine #23’s first story (even though it’s referred to as the second in the editor’s preface) is “I Think Therefore I Die” by Fraser Sherman. Sherman, whose earlier work has appeared in Allegory and on Drabblecast, presents a Renaissance France where the key to what most of the world considers magic is really only the application of mathematical principles uncovered by Rene Descartes. Utilizing the techniques of advanced geometry, practitioners of Cartesian mathematics can travel between distant geographical points instantaneously. They can also affect minor healing on themselves. For the story’s roguish hero, Hugh of Essex, a skirt-chasing Cartesian prone to dueling, the ability to staunch his wounds is a valuable one.

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Win a Copy of M. Harold Page’s The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets

Tuesday, January 7, 2014 John ONeill Comments 6 comments

It’s January 7th already and we haven’t given away any books this year. Time to fix that.

Here at Black Gate, we like to reward faithful readers with the finest in free fantasy and that tradition continues this month with the exciting Scholar Knight novels of M. Harold Page: The Sword is Mightier and Blood in the Streets. Here’s the description for the first, The Sword is Mightier:

The blade sheared through padding, collar bone, ribs, and came out the other side. Head, arm and shoulder thudded to the ground. The remainder of the corpse still stood, sheared torso like a bucket of steaming offal.

England AD 1454, the chaotic eve of the Wars of the Roses.

Jack Rose would rather be a scholar than a knight. However, when a brutal landowner steals his family estates and plans to evict the tenants, Jack must take up the sword and win back his inheritance by force of arms. As he wades through increasingly lethal encounters, it becomes clear that War is in his blood. Now he must decide who he really is…

How do you enter to win? Simple — just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com, using as the subject the name of the first Master Strike in the German School of Fencing (we’ll even give you a clue: it’s “Zornhau”), and we’ll enter you in the drawing.

Entries must be received by Friday, January 31, 2014. One lucky winner will win both books. The winner will be contacted by e-mail and books will be delivered in digital format.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Terms and conditions subject to change. Not valid where prohibited by law. Eat your vegetables. And good luck!

A History of Godzilla on Film, Part 2: The Golden Age (1963–1968)

Tuesday, January 7, 2014 Ryan Harvey Comments 5 comments

Welcome back… the double holiday interruption delayed this march across (and on top of) the Tokyo skyline. But now the Big-G is back and about to enter the Golden Age of Japanese Fantasy Cinema and the peak of kaiju movie greatness.

Other Installments

Part 1: Origins (1954–1962)
Part 3: Down and Out in Osaka (1969–1983)
Part 4: The Heisei Era (1984–1997)
Part 5: The Travesty and the Millennium Era (1996–2004)
Addendum: The 2014 Godzilla

The Godzilla Masterpiece: Mothra vs. Godzilla (1964)

The astronomical success of King Kong vs. Godzilla made Toho Studios commit to yearly Godzilla movies for the rest of the decade, as well as increasing their giant monster output in general. The studio shifted away from broader science-fiction epics like The Mysterians: the same year that King Kong vs. Godzilla ignited the box-office, Toho’s more ambitious and expensive science-fiction movie from the team of director Ishiro Honda and special effects creator Eiji Tsubaraya, Gorath, made a poorer showing. From now on, Toho would push that they had monsters and were ready to hurl them against each other for audience’s viewing pleasure.

After briefly considering a King Kong re-match, G-series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka turned to a hometown hero: Mothra, the monster-goddess from the popular 1961 Ishiro Honda film of the same name. Mothra was the point where the Japanese kaiju film came into its own as a specific cultural style different from the US model that first inspired it. The lovely yet powerful Mothra was a perfect foe to put in the opposite corner from Godzilla — at least in terms of box-office appeal. From a story and special-effects perspective, it was a trickier idea: Godzilla fighting a giant mystical moth?

But the creative team came through in an astonishing way: Mothra vs. Godzilla is the height of the Godzilla series and one of the finest monster epics ever put on film. This is the movie to show people at the start of a Godzilla odyssey, since it captures so well the Japanese interpretation of the giant monster genre, has Godzilla at his most charismatic yet menacing, and is more fun than most amusement parks. Eiji Tsubaraya was at his zenith with visual effects; after some wonky optical work in King Kong vs. Godzilla, the effects here are seamless, especially the scenes featuring the miniature Twin Fairies (the shobijin, played by pop singing duo The Peanuts). The two monster battles, with Godzilla against the adult Mothra and then against two larval Mothras, are thrillingly staged and scored.

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Inkjetlings Round eTable: Jackson’s Desolation of The Hobbit?

Monday, January 6, 2014 Nick Ozment Comments 19 comments

This week Frederic S. Durbin, Gabe Dybing, and I discuss our impressions of Peter Jackson’s latest film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The conversation is a casual and meandering one among friends, although I have tried to group observations under distinct topics. In keeping with the informal nature of the exchange, I have used our first names.

First Impressions (and a link to a completely different review)

FRED: It’s a lot of fun. I was surprised in this one by the extreme departures from the book . . . so this one felt to me like I was watching really well-done fan fiction. But if you can accept that, the movie really is entertaining. It’s fun seeing the characters and settings. I’ll hold off saying any more until I’m sure you guys have seen it.

GABE: It was a lot of fun, but it certainly will be interesting to talk about. How about you, Nick? Are we waiting for you to see it?

NICK: I finally did get to The Desolation of Smaug — Mel and I arranged a date night and saw it together. She is a HUGE fan of the LOTR movies, but with this film, she feels that something is just off. I found it an enjoyable spectacle, with the caveat that in tone it is very little like Tolkien.

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Terror in the Heroic Age: Lovecraft and Culbard’s At the Mountains of Madness: A Graphic Novel

Monday, January 6, 2014 John ONeill Comments 4 comments

“At the Mountains of Madness” is one of my favorite Lovecraft tales. It was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories; I was first exposed to it through the brilliant audio adaption from Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, which I listened to during a snowy commute through lonely back highways in Illinois in the winter of 2010. Marvelous stuff.

So in November, I was very intrigued to read James Maliszewski’s review of a recent comic adaptation by I.N.J. Culbard. Here’s James:

In 124 pages, Culbard succeeds in re-telling one of Lovecraft’s best tales in a fashion that’s both engaging and true to its source. That’s harder than it sounds…

Culbard deftly pares the story down to its essentials, in terms of action, dialog, and exposition. The story thus moves along at a fairly brisk pace, something that cannot be said of the novella, love it though I do. Second, the artwork, which, to my mind, recalls Hergé’s Tintin series, contributes greatly to a sense of narrative motion, which is vitally important in an adaptation of a long and complex story like this one. Furthermore, the artwork suits the subject matter perfectly, recalling as it does (at least to me) stories of late 19th and early 20th century exploration in the still-dark corners of the globe… Even though I already knew the plot intimately, I found Culbard’s strong, clear, almost innocent, illustration style gave it new life, something I didn’t think possible.

Sold! I especially enjoyed James’s description of artwork that recalled “stories of late 19th and early 20th century exploration in the still-dark corners of the globe.” I asked for the Culbard’s graphic novel version for Christmas and my lovely bride was kind enough to deliver.

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Mark of the Cloven, Part 1: Cripples’ Deluge

Monday, January 6, 2014 MichaelPenkas Comments 0 Comment

Mark of the Cloven is a nine-part illustrated novel set in the narrative world of Jiba Molei Anderson’s Horsemen series. The premise is that the ancient gods of Africa have set out to make their presence known in the world again. To this end, they have taken a sort of benign possession of seven human beings, not so much controlling their actions as giving them access to their forms and abilities. Basically, seven mortals are granted the powers of gods and use these powers to become superheroes. Of course, the existence of superheroes all but demands the equal presence of supervillains; chief among these villains are the Deitis and their superhuman children. At the start of this story, the seven god-blessed mortals are already well-known in this world; their influence has affected drastic social changes, resulting in Africa ascending to the dominant world superpower, as the United States falls into a new Depression.

Part one of this story opens with Djenaba, a doctor struggling to keep people alive in the remnants of Detroit, being asked by one of the god-mortals to help a boatload of refugees escape to Canada (in this world, America’s border patrols are focused on keeping people in, not out). In her aspect as water goddess Yemaya, Djenaba is guiding the rusted-out boat to the Canadian shore when she is attacked by three offspring of the Deitis, code-named Strain, Clarion, and Crate. All three of them are handicapped in some way, but Djenaba/Yemaya doesn’t underestimate them for long, because each has found a way to counter his or her handicap, turning weakness into strength. What follows is a series of fight scenes where our heroine struggles not only to stay alive, but also to protect the refugees (and even her three attackers).

The superhero comics came to prominence in the late 1930s, during the Great Depression. By setting the series in a new Depression, Jiba Anderson and Jude Mire evoke the very core of the superhero myth: the dream of having the power to make the world a better place. As a doctor, Djenaba is already in a position to improve the lives of others. We see just enough of her efforts at the story’s beginning to know that it is, essentially, a losing battle. As the quasi-goddess Yemaya, she has more power, but also attracts new problems in the form of supervillains. It goes back to the narrative device that keeps most superhero comics spinning their creative wheels indefinitely: all that great power only brings great obstacles that force the hero to exert more effort simply to maintain the status quo.

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Black Gate Online Fiction: Sword Sisters by Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe

Sunday, January 5, 2014 John ONeill Comments 3 comments

Black Gate is very pleased to offer our readers an exclusive excerpt from Swords Sisters, the new novel of heroic fantasy from Tara Cardinal and Alex Bledsoe.

Cast aside by her mother, tormented (literally) by her father, feared by humans and despised by most of her own kind, Aella is determined not to care. Not to care what they think, not to care if they like her, not to care about anything or anyone. Just so long as no one tries to touch her or imprison her again, Aella couldn’t care less.

Until… he pulled an arrow from Aella’s back and kissed her cheek. Until… she carried Aella home and stood between her and a giant spider. And a rioting mob. Until… they came to Aella looking for help. Aella, daughter of demon and witch, must find herself and forge her own route to a destiny she doesn’t want to believe and others simply don’t want. At first a heroine in name alone, Aella discovers she has the strength and the heart to control her demonic lineage and truly wear the title — hero. She also finds something even more valuable: friendship. Amelia, her Sword Sister, isn’t just worth dying for. She’s worth living for.

Tara Cardinal wrote, produced, and starred in the feature film Legend of the Red Reaper. She writes non-fiction for IndependentCritic.com and NerdRemix.com. Alex Bledsoe is the author of the Eddie LaCrosse novels (The Sword-Edged Blonde, Burn Me Deadly, Dark Jenny, and Wake of the Bloody Angel), the novels of the Memphis vampires (Blood Groove and The Girls with Games of Blood), and the Tufa novels (The Hum and the Shiver, Wisp of a Thing, and the forthcoming Long Black Curl). He is a regular blogger for Black Gate.

The complete catalog of Black Gate Online Fiction, including stories by E.E. Knight, Vaughn Heppner, Howard Andrew Jones, David Evan Harris, John C. Hocking, Michael Shea, Peadar Ó Guilín, Aaron Bradford Starr, Martha Wells, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, C.S.E. Cooney, and many others, is here.

Sword Sisters was published by Rogue Blades Entertainment on December 11, 2013. It is 200 pages and currently available in trade paperback for $10.00 (or $6.00 for the digital version). Learn more at Rogue Blades Entertainment and in Jason Waltz’s recent article Sword Sisters: A Partnership, a Prequel, a Picture Show, and a Print Run right here at Black Gate.

Read a complete sample chapter of Sword Sisters here.

Universal Labels 47 Ronin a Flop less than 24 Hours After Release

Sunday, January 5, 2014 John ONeill Comments 16 comments

Universal Pictures announced it would take a writedown on its $175 million fantasy epic 47 Ronin on December 26th, the day after the film entered wide release on Christmas Day.

While it’s routine for studios to write off projected losses for underperforming films, it’s highly unusual for one to announce that such a major project is a bomb so early in the film’s run, virtually killing what little hope it had to defy expectations and turn things around.

My teenage sons, oblivious to wider industry news, saw the trailer — packed with gorgeous fantasy landscapes; pirates; dark dungeons; and life-and-death swordfights against samurai, monsters, and flying dragons — and were sold immediately.

For myself, I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece, but I was astounded that Universal had dismissed the film so cavalierly, and my curmudgeonly nature immediately made me assume they were idiots. So we caught a matinee showing yesterday, in a nearly empty theater.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. Rinko Kikuchi does a marvelous job as the (literally) scenery-chewing, shape-shifting witch and veteran actor Hiroyuki Sanada (most recently seen in The Wolverine and the TV shows Lost and Revenge) carries the film as the leader of the legendary band of 47 disgraced samurai who avenges the death of their noble lord, against the direct orders of the Shogun.

Even Keanu Reeves delivers an entirely serviceable performance as Kai, the half-breed who leads the weaponless ronin into a demon-infested forest and wins them some cool samurai ordnance. The marketing has portrayed Reeves as the lead, but it’s really Sanada who has the most screen time.

The tale of the original 47 ronin, whose 18th century graves still stand today at Sengaku-ji in Japan, is perhaps the most famous example of bushidō, the samurai code of honor, in Japanese history, and is considered by some the country’s “national legend.”

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January/February Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction now on Sale

Saturday, January 4, 2014 John ONeill Comments 10 comments

Just how excited I am by the arrival of F&SF every two months is probably unfairly influenced by the cover.

I can’t help it — I’m just a sucker for good cover art. Some of my favorite recent covers have been Max Bertolini’s marvelous down-in-the-dungeon piece for May/June 2012, Maurizio Manzieri’s enigmatic alien egg for July/August 2011, and our own Mark Evan’s first cover for F&SF, the 2012 Jan/Feb issue.

Of course, all the best magazine covers feature space ships, intrepid humans exploring foreboding alien landscapes and — especially! — robots. Which is why I was especially taken with the cover for the January/February 2014 issue, by the great Ed Valigursky.

Valigursky, who painted covers for IF, Amazing, Fantastic, and many others (not to mention many of my all-time favorite vintage paperback covers, like Space Viking and The Cosmic Computer), died in 2009, so I’m not sure how editor Gordon van Gelder managed to get his hands on a cover I’ve never seen before, but he did. Valigursky’s piece pays tribute to the classic look of F&SF from the 50s and 60s, and still somehow manages to look modern and fresh. That’s no small feat.

Chuck Rothman reviews the issue for Tangent Online, including Oliver Buckram’s novelette “The Museum of Error.”

Sometimes a wonderful conceit is more than enough to hold a story together. “The Museum of Error” is one of these: a museum that features various scientific mistakes –- the “Rounding Errors Through the Ages” exhibit, robots who insist they’re human, the Never-Right Clock, and Pete the Petrified Cat. Herbert Linden is the Assistant Curator for Military History, and is called to find out what happened to Pete, who may have been stolen by their competitors, the Science Institute. Oliver Buckram’s story is filled with imagination, and is very cleverly constructed, with a mishmash of what seem to be one-liners [that] all come together in the end.

This issue contains stories from C.C. Finlay (whose novella “The Nursemaid’s Suitor” appeared in Black Gate 8), Albert E. Cowdrey, Robert Reed, Alex Irvine, and others.

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New Treasures: Old Mars, Edited by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois

Saturday, January 4, 2014 John ONeill Comments 9 comments

I heard George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozois were doing a new science fiction anthology about Mars and I thought, “Eh, Mars. It’s just no fun anymore. Too bad they don’t write stories about Mars the way they used to — like Clark Ashton Smith’s brilliant “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” or Leigh Brackett and C.L. Moore’s fabulous tales of decadent civilizations and inscrutable alien mysteries. No one has that much imagination any more. Bah! I think I’ll go yell at the kids to get off the lawn.”

Then Old Mars finally arrived and it thawed my mean old heart. Martin and Dozois have rallied some of the finest writers in the industry — like Michael Moorcock, Joe R. Lansdale, Ian Mcdonald, Howard Waldrop, Matthew Hughes, Phyllis Eisenstein, and many others — to write brand new tales of Mars in the classic pulp tradition. Here’s the marvelous book description:

Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars. Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. Heinlein’s Red Planet. These and so many more inspired generations of readers with a sense that science fiction’s greatest wonders did not necessarily lie far in the future or light-years across the galaxy but were to be found right now on a nearby world tantalizingly similar to our own — a red planet that burned like an ember in our night sky… and in our imaginations.

This new anthology of fifteen all-original science fiction stories, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, celebrates the Golden Age of Science Fiction, an era filled with tales of interplanetary colonization and derring-do. Before the advent of powerful telescopes and space probes, our solar system could be imagined as teeming with strange life-forms and ancient civilizations — by no means always friendly to the dominant species of Earth. And of all the planets orbiting that G-class star we call the Sun, none was so steeped in an aura of romantic decadence, thrilling mystery, and gung-ho adventure as Mars.

Join such seminal contributors as Michael Moorcock, Mike Resnick, Joe R. Lansdale, S. M. Stirling, Mary Rosenblum, Ian McDonald, Liz Williams, James S. A. Corey, and others in this brilliant retro anthology that turns its back on the cold, all-but-airless Mars of the Mariner probes and instead embraces an older, more welcoming, more exotic Mars: a planet of ancient canals cutting through red deserts studded with the ruined cities of dying races.

Martin and Dozois may well have produced my dream anthology. You don’t know how thrilled I am to see this kind of open-hearted embrace of the genre’s pulp roots from a major publisher.

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